Climate Ed: Inspiring Kids on Climate Action

Aim

We send trained community volunteers into schools to deliver workshops about carbon literacy and climate action.

Our simple and engaging approach inspires children into climate action. And we’d love your support to carry on the work. 

So, what exactly do we do?

We teach children about climate science to inspire them and their families to take action. We do this by sending trained community volunteers into schools to deliver workshops about carbon literacy and the future beyond fossil fuels.

What’s the vision?

We aim to give children the knowledge and the motivation to get involved with the issue and discover that climate action can be fun. Through this we also aim to make children less anxious about the issue, by giving them a message of hope and positivity.

Images: One of our whole-school climate assemblies; one of our volunteers, Chris, leading a workshop in November 2021; the workshop team in our first ever school, Loughborough Primary in south London.

We’ve already achieved so much!

So far, our volunteers have educated over 5000 children about climate change. On top of this over 600 students have been through our in-depth carbon literacy programme.

We started off small and now we need your support to reach more students. We’ve got lots of volunteers and schools who want to welcome them. A lot of our volunteers are leaders in their fields - scientists, journalists, sustainability experts. We're currently working with primary schools in south London (Merton, Wandsworth, Lambeth and Southwark). 

We're responding to the immediate need for more teaching about climate in schools. 75% of teachers recently said they hadn’t received adequate training to teach about climate change (YouGov Survey 2019). Our volunteers have energy, expertise and a great set of activities to engage children. Through video animation, drama role plays and art-based activities, we get them thinking about climate change in a fun, positive way, and taking small bite-size actions that feel manageable and worthwhile. 

 Our goals

We’re raising money towards the costs of our summer and autumn terms. For our summer term we have a waiting list of 20 schools and over 500 students who want to participate in our programme.

Every student we teach will also reach back to their families. So 500 students = 2000 people.  And if each of these families is inspired to drop just one tonne from their annual carbon footprint, that really makes a difference.

A breakdown of the costs and benefits

All money donated through this Crowdfunder will go to frontline services – paying the costs of delivering workshops in schools, rather than fundraising or other costs.

It currently costs us approximately £6000 a term to run our programme – that’s to recruit and support the volunteers, match them up with schools, and monitor the effectiveness of the programme.

To get technical: if in the summer term we teach 500 students and each of their families is able to drop one tonne from their annual carbon footprint, that’s a saving of 500 tonnes of CO2 at a cost of £6000, working out at £12 per tonne of CO2. Direct air capture of CO2 currently costs anything from £70-£400 per tonne. By teaching people about carbon literacy and saving the CO2 going into the atmosphere in the first place, we could save CO2 between 5 and 33 times more efficiently than removal/sequestration methods!

Can you support us to reach more children? 

Images: Some of our amazing volunteers!

You can find out more about our work here.

Here are some testimonials from schools:

• ‘Climate Ed were nothing but fantastic.’ (Ravenstone Primary, London)
• ‘The presentation was perfect and got the children talking. Brilliant.’ (Wimbledon Chase Primary, London)
• ‘I would recommend that all children have the opportunity to take part in this carefully constructed and relevant programme.’ (Furzedown Primary School, London)

And from the children:

• ‘I enjoyed it because it inspired me to do more things to help climate change. It was all amazing.’
• ‘Now I want to help the world by spreading the word.’
• ‘Before I knew about climate change but had no idea how to prevent it. But now I feel passionate about the topic and I know how I can help.'
• ‘I enjoyed all of it because it was inspiring.’
• ‘I liked learning about the carbon footprint of foods and transport. I liked the people teaching us, they were very nice.’
• ‘It is interesting and amazing, so well done!’
• ‘I liked it all and I know much more now.’
• ‘I think I have learned a lot and I'm going to try and spread the word.’
• ‘I enjoyed all of it, it was amazing!’
• ‘I would give it 1,000,000,000 out of five if I could!’

Images: Street outreach work in Brixton and Wimbledon, 2019

This project successfully funded on 12th April 2022